Wednesday, July 2, 2008

You're right, too much access to cheap debt has created a bubble of sorts in asset values....that said, why are the Liberals sitting idly by while Canada's largest telecommunications carrier, BCE/Bell Canada is being turned from an investment grade credit issuer into a junk bond fiasco in the making? Their debt will go from $12 billion to $44 billion.

Meanwhile their equity will go from $42 billion to $8 billion.

The interest required to service this mountain of debt will mean that BCE will not pay taxes for a VERY LONG TIME to come. This means Ottawa will forego $800 million a year in taxes.

Rather than simply being a lose-lose proposition, this mess of a deal will be a lose-lose-lose proposition, since the consumer will be the one to fund this bankruptcy in the making.

With an astronomically high cost of capital, this company will have no incentive to expand into new services or lower their service costs. The absence of competitive price pressure will simply mean that Rogers and Telus can continue to charge Canadians some of the highest cell phone charges in the world.

What are the Liberals saying or doing about this?

Brent Fullard

PS: Just in case the Liberals are reluctant to make this BCE leveraged buyout into a political issue, it already is, since all the lose-lose-lose outcomes identified above would not have occurred if Harper/Flaherty hadn't got in the way of BCE becoming a publicly held and taxed income trust, on that fateful Halloween 2006. Why are the Liberals allowing the CONs to get away from being accountable for all the CONs' "unintended consequences"? Who is going to hold the government to account, if not the Official Opposition?

It’s high time the Liberals taught Harper and Flaherty the ABC’s of BCE.

1 comment:

Funny how one event becomes the tipping point for ecomomic termoil. When Jimmy did the dirty to Income Trusts, nobody stepped up to support us, the general public yawned, the media hid and who knows what the Liberals were doing. And people still don't get it, BCE as an Income Trust would generate a ton of tax revenue, BCE the way it's going will generate ZERO. I love this country, but it sure is frustrating to watch opportunity get trampled by Steve the all mighty.

EVENTS

Income Trust Halloween VigilThanks to all who participated in both the Ottawa and Calgary vigils to mark the anniversary of the announcement.

WE"D LIKE SOME ANSWERS

As you well know, the ‘income trust thing’ has grown beyond the
question of whether fair taxes are paid on income from trusts. It’s
become a giant dirty snowball, and as it rolls forward it accumulates
more and more bulk. There are so many unanswered questions. Let's list a few and invite our "Accountable" government and our free press to provide some much-needed answers.

It is said “Trusts are inefficient use of capital. Why?” Two
related questions are ‘Whose money is it, anyway?’, and ‘Do Canadian
investors have a free and efficient market?’

How can information that is already in the public domain at SEDAR
make for a state secret? How could such information be used to harm
the Canadian national interest? And who would cause the harm?

Why won’t the Canadian media investigate the falsehoods and
misrepresentations told by the Minister of Finance to a committee of
Parliament? Was the Minister in contempt of Parliament?

Why won’t the Canadian media report (a) government tax revenues
gained from BCE in 2006 when BCE was a corporation to (b) government
tax revenues that would be gained in 2007 from BCE, if BCE had been
allowed to proceed to a trust, and (c) government tax revenues that
will be gained in 2007 from BCE, when BCE ownership has been carved
up as 45% foreign ownership and 55% large Canadian pension fund
ownership?